A blog on technology, run by Kozminski University students and supervised by NeRDS

Tag Archives: tactile tablet

Nowadays multi-touch screens are used in majority of devices and the trend seems to be growing. Unfortunately it looks like the technology forgot about big group of people who cannot see the displayed content. In Poland there is about 90 thousand people struggling with blindness and about 315 millions of people with this disability all over the world. What is more the problem is predicted to grow. People who use Braille is about 150 millions of people. In general we are generation that is less likely to read things so instead there is more and more videos, pictures and iconographic. Fortunately there is a company that is developing technology which allows blind people use tablets.

BLITAB® is the World’s first tactile tablet for blind and visually impaired people. It is a Braille device for reading and writing that displays one whole page Braille text, without any mechanical elements. We can compare it to an e-book which displays small physical bubbles. They rise and fall on demand, in a result one whole page can be read and can be written via Braille Perkins Keyboard. This is the first time that users can have an overview of a whole document.

I believe that the idea is great and I do not understand why blind and visually impaired people had to wait for such a long time for this solution. It is already possible to sign up to pre-order. I hope that this solution will work soon and that more companies will think about peoples’ disabilities and improving their everyday life.